Flamingo Friday: Moment of Waking

Is it just me, or do the feathers pushed up by this flamingo's bill not look like a cresting wave with wind-blown spray? Only...more pink?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Some Musing on Muses

A number of excellent scientists, naturalists, and other writers who are drawn, with a magnetic pull, towards studying and observing the world and its properties, have written very beautiful essays on why and how they first became enamored of and addicted to this way of seeing and examining the world. Rachel Carson, a writer whose prose is so pitch-perfect that it induces in me spasms of admiring envy, has a number of such essays. Phil Plait, a scientist and blogger, has a recent article in Slate about how the moment of sheer joy he experienced when looking through a telescope for the first time inspired him to become a scientist.

Not enough is said explicitly—though it is everywhere implied, within labs and within the world of science bloggers—about the basic, necessary joy, the thrill, the visceral excitement, that is the fundamental requirement and basis of the pursuit of a science career. One could easily argue that it should be the basis of any career, not just a scientific one—but I think it’s especially important to emphasize in the context of science because so often scientists are perceived to be emotionless or robotic, and because science itself is so often presented as being a dull conglomeration of facts, equations, and Latin names. (Poetry, in fact, is often taught in the same I-know-how-to-make-you-hate-this way, and should also be redeemed, rejuvenated, and refreshed by its devotees and practitioners—for heaven’s sake, it’s meant to wake the soul, not deaden the mind!).

In one of my favorite passages in Middlemarch, the author, George Eliot, describes the beginning of a very particular kind of love affair, and one that she acknowledges is not often addressed in novels—or anywhere else; she describes how Dr. Lydgate’s “intellectual passion” was “kindl[ed]” when he was a boy: bored at home, he absently opened an encyclopedia to an entry on anatomy, and read about the valves of the heart—and, in connecting valves with his knowledge of the Latin for doors, “through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanisms in the human frame.” In this moment, “the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast space planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge.”

Is that great or what?

In a later section—another favorite of mine—Eliot, when discussing another character, talks about the ways in which we fail to see the sadness of events that we perceive to be everyday, common occurrences: “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Beautiful and terrible, all at once—and yet I think that second sentence could also be applied to some of what is wonderful about science—that there are those moments in which we do feel and see what is ordinary in a way that is piercing, magnificent, overpowering, revelatory. We can convince people that science studying black holes, or blue whales, or things that explode, is cool—but it’s not really those things that makes science so exhilarating: it’s the sensation of awe that shivers through you when you understand the way the moon influences the tides or watch an octopus change color so quickly that its body seems to flicker, as if colored flames are playing beneath the surface of its skin.

That’s what should—and, I think, usually does—motivate most scientific inquiry—that desire to know more in order to appreciate more, that desire to hear, if only for a second, the roar on the other side of silence.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Did you have, as Phil Plait puts it, a “Saturn moment”? What’s the spark that kindled your intellectual passion?

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

One Good Shot: I Want THAT Piece

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Mr. Gizzard: A Paean

A year or two ago, my parents somehow (I’m still not entirely clear on how this came up) got into a conversation about owl pellets. My mother, who knows quite a bit about animal life, explained that owls grind up food in their gizzards, and that the digestible parts go on to their stomachs while the bones, fur, feathers, and other general ickiness get lumped into pellets that are then regurgitated.

As she explained the various steps in owls’ eating, my father observed, “So, they have a basic mammalian digestive system, then.”

“Um…no.” After my mother had explained a little more (including the distinctions between birds and mammals), she teased, “Haven’t you noticed how, as we and our friends are all getting older and more and more things are ailing us, no one ever complains about their gizzard?”

Not missing a beat, my father said, “That’s because the gizzard is always the last to go.”

I mention this story not to make fun of my father’s confusion over avian vs. mammalian digestion but to illustrate some of the many things I admire about him.

First, he’s never afraid to admit his ignorance of something, even though he’s one of the least ignorant people I know (and for those inclined to mock the gizzard incident, how many of you know that snails make their own shells, huh?). [Oooh, and as a side note, it just occurred to me that Gizzard Incident would make a great band name.]

Second, he’s one of the funniest people I know. He helped me come up with a number of my pun-ny departmental-talk titles back when I was in grad school—and the ones he didn’t help with he still inspired. (“Sex and the Single Crab,” “Home Is Where the Hurt Is,” “Scents and Sensibility”—the list goes on.) He’s also the best joke teller I’ve ever encountered.

Finally, one of the things I like best about my father is also illustrated in his responses to the natural world. My father is not an outdoors-y person (why eat outside amongst insects when you can be bug-free—and near a DVD player—in your own home?), and he’s always avoided nature documentaries, claiming that animals have no plot. My mother got a birding scope for her birthday; my father got gift certificates to the movie theater.

At the same time, though, whenever something in the natural world amazes, baffles, or delights him, he never hesitates to express his fascination or astonishment. Nor has he ever felt it to be somehow weak or beneath him to notice when an adorable animal is cute.

[is this cute or what?]

And why should he pretend otherwise? Unlike so many people, he’s got nothing to prove, and he’s open-minded enough to acknowledge when something is interesting, even if—as with a midnight trip to the beach to watch for horseshoe-crab mating—it’s not something he would seek out on his own.

It’s that complete lack of posturing, that profound sincerity, that I admire so much, and it’s a sincerity that pervades his actions and relationships generally—including those with his daughters.

I may not know if he knows that barnacles are crustaceans or that chicks have egg-teeth—but I’ve never had to wonder or worry about how he feels about me.

Thanks, Dad.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Flamingo Friday: The Fan

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}